Post Office

Postal Service (USPS) crates sit on the floor at the Brookland Post Office in Washington, D.C., U.S. No customer data was stolen in a recent data breach, USPS officials say. Postal Service is warning that it will likely default on up to $6.9 billion in payments for future retiree health benefits for the fifth straight year. It is citing a coming cash crunch that could disrupt day-to-day mail delivery. Postmaster General Megan Brennan stressed an urgent need for federal regulators to grant the Postal Service wide freedom to increase stamp prices to cover costs.

Australia Post has quietly created an email add-on tool that uses machine learning to find unpaid bills and itemise when they need to be paid. The postal service said it would use undisclosed machine learning techniques to extract data from the bills and itemise them according to due date. In particular, Bill Scanner looks for the payment amount, due date, and who issued the bill, and also extracts a full copy "for presentation in the application". "Bill Scanner verifies your Postbillpay bills automatically," the postal service said.

So, for me as a marketer, one of the most exciting trends in design today isn't Batman's new ride, it's the way we measure effectiveness – and the science and technology we're using to do it. We want to make it easy for our customers to get the important things in life done, and design marketing activity to support that goal. Recently, we've been using biometric technology to measure our customers' unconscious responses to'shopping' in one of our branches. Hopefully, a trip to the local Post Office branch is a lot less stressful than DiCaprio's ordeal.